Lasered Lights: a new laser-cutting project

Post date: 18-Jun-2014 12:25:09

As is so often the case, my attempts to sleep one evening were stymied by an image of something I'd like to build - in this case a toy lantern, cut from laser cut plastic and plywood.

Well a few days later I sat down for an hour or two and sketched out the pieces you can see in the first image, spread them out into Ponoko's template files and sent it off - and today the bits arrived.

As usual the results are lovely - the Ponoko folks added a few extra layers of protective film to hold the small pieces together during transit, and the consistency across all the cutting is really nice. As you can see, I immediately spread the lot out across my desk at work - I had to find out if my assumptions about the way the model would snap together actually worked.

All in all the design is pretty solid - I continue to fiddle with tolerances on some stuff (in this case the laser took less material than I expected) but I think with a little tweaking I'll have a design that's not only cute, but might actually be popular.